Today is All Souls’ day, the remembrance of the dead, and so I have picked a funeral song from the hymn book. ‘When human voices cannot sing’ by Shirley Murray.
Verse 1 acknowledges that hearts do break in bereavement, and that singing praise must necessarily cease during that first period of intense grief. God knows that, and we can bring our grief to him, aloud or silently. The second verse admits there is also often fear: the fear of not knowing what happens in death, or of dying in the same, perhaps unpleasant way. We ask to be set free from that fear of the unknown, and have our path lit by Christ. The third verse asks for God’s love to be as real as it was at Easter. The fourth releases the beloved to go ahead of us on this unknown journey in peace and that our sorrow may come to an end.
The Church has to tread a wary path between the general assumption among most people in contemporary society that there is an afterlife or paradise to which all souls go without exception, and the apparent teaching of the bible that ‘not everyone will be saved’ (go to heaven, spend eternity with God, however you choose to express it). Even Jesus who welcomed everyone in life and extended God’s covenant with Israel to the whole world, still taught of the narrow way that not all will find, of those who call him Lord but who will find themselves rejected, and of Gehenna, the unpleasant fate that awaits even those who call someone else a fool, from which the popular idea of hell may derive. The Church’s teaching has generally been around the idea that entry into heaven is for all who believe in Jesus and repent of their sins, rather than for everyone or for the non-existent person who never sins. Yet dare to challenge, however gently, someone who is convinced that their deceased relative is now an angel in paradise and we will be charged with insensitivity or prejudice.
What the lyrics of the hymn remind us is that the future is truly unknown. The Bible offers many images: of a stairway to heaven, souls given new bodies, people in white robes worshiping around a throne, a new Jerusalem. In our own day people make comparisons with a caterpillar that cannot imagine the butterfly it will become. All these can only be poor metaphors for what eternal life really is. All we can do with certainty is put our trust in Christ who said he would go ahead of us to prepare a place. ‘Justorum animae in manu dei sunt’ – ‘the souls of the righteous are in the hands of God’.